Tuesday

On Tuesday a student at my school committed suicide.

He was in my class two years ago. I thought he was a sweet kid.

He was in my friend's class last year. She said that by then he was off the wall.

He would write "I eat babies" on the wall and run around the classroom. Whenever she called guidance the counselor said he was taking medication and getting other professional help.

From the bits and pieces of the story that we got it was, in the end, family problems that got to the kid. His parents split when he was a freshman. Supposedly his mother remarried last week and did not bother to tell him about it until after the fact.

I heard some of the other kids saying, once they heard the news, that they wish they had treated him better. Quite a few of them picked on him.

The kids have a strange code of ethics when it comes to choosing targets. If a kid has a disability or social problem that they have no control over the other kids lay off.

The provocative kids, however, may as well draw a bull's eyes on the backs of their shirts. The kid who killed himself was, evidently, quite a provoker.

If only the other kids knew what was behind it.

There's a sort of limbo the mind goes into upon hearing of a young person with so many life experiences ahead of him ending it all on a random Tuesday in November.

On one level it's unfathomable. Didn't he know things always get better?

On another level, the mind gets it. At seventeen one does not yet have the perspective and life experience to understand that there are ways out of troughs.

Overall, though, this one falls into the category of hands-down awful.

Some things just are.